Read Online Mother Russia by Robert Littell - Free Book Online Page B

hulking, balding man with feverish eyes, tells Pravdin.
    “Not possible,” Pravdin assures him. “I phoned from a pay booth and neither of us mentioned my name.”
    The journalist shrugs. “If they were going to haul you in, they would have done it a long time ago. What about the interview with the kids who use drugs?”
    “What about my fee?” Pravdin retorts.

    Hull hands him an envelope, Pravdin stuffs it into his briefcase and gives the journalist a slip of paper with an address and a time written on it. “They will be watching to see if you are followed,” he reminds him. “If you are, they won’t be around when you get there. The conditions you understand? In your article, no names and fifty rubles a head for them.”
    Hull nods. “Listen, Pravdin, there’s a choreographer with the Bolshoi who is supposed to have lost his job for applying for an exit visa to Israel. I don’t have a name but maybe you could nose around and set up something for me.”
    “Maybe,” Pravdin says evasively.
    “I also hear—” A lame lady limps by and Hull waits for her to pass. “I hear there’s a story in you.”
    Pravdin spits a mouthful of coffee back into his cup. “What story where in me?” he wails. “Where do you hear such things?”
    An army officer puts his coffee and bun on their table and goes off in search of a chair.
    “I heard it from a Swedish correspondent, who says he got it from someone called the Druse. Does the name mean anything to you?”
    “The Druse,” Pravdin protests sullenly, fighting down hysteria, “is no one I ever heard of.”
    Pravdin, a maître d’ from a seedy hotel, ducks in and out of the milling crowd, a bottle of mineral water in one hand, in the other a vinegary Georgian red (“Ha!” sneers Zoya, “mis en bouteille dans le sous-sol de GUM”) filling with delicate flicks of his thin wrist and a terminal flourish the half-empty glasses of the guests.
    “The trouble with Russia,” Zoya is lecturing some of her friends, “is that she kills her artists.”

    “America kills them too,” Pravdin stage whispers, splashing wine into her outstretched glass, “by making them rich.”
    “Zoya, dear, wherever did you find him?” cried Ludmila Serafimovna, one of Mother Russia’s cronies who lives in the prewar apartment building that backs onto the alley. “He’s absolutely adorable. In those funny shoes one can’t even hear him coming up on one.”
    “I didn’t find him,” Zoya explains cheerfully. “He’s our new attic.”
    “Quelle chance,” Ludmila Serafimovna exclaims. “Ah, there she is, the birthday girl herself,” and she cuts through the crowd like the prow of a ship, silk scarfs trailing from her fingertips, to embrace Nadezhda.
    “Wine or water?” Pravdin offers Friedemann T., who has backed a very drunk General Shuvkin into a corner and blocks his escape with his caped body.
    “The reason socialist realism doesn’t move people,” Friedemann T. is saying—“wine,” he flings at Pravdin and holds out his glass for a refill—“is that it shows them as they are. Take it from someone who has an instinct for such matters, the only thing that catches the attention of people is to show them, even for a fleeting moment, what they could become. This is the point of departure for my abstract socialist realism, you see.”
    “Campaigns?” hiccups the general.
    “I beg your pardon?” Friedemann T. inquires in confusion.
    “Waak, waak, help, help.” A flutter of wings! Vladimir Ilyich, somehow loose from his cage, sails around the room, winds up perched on Mother Russia’s broken Singer.
    “Isn’t he beautiful,” squeals Ophelia Long Legs. “Look, comrade Eisenhower, a genuine bird!” She holds out her wine glass to Vladimir Ilyich; frightened by all the attention,he backs off, wings beating the air, then leaps to the curtain rod above the window, out of arm’s reach.
    “Help, waak, help, waak.”
    “All the same,” Porfiry Yakolev, the